INSTANT WIN OR INSTANT WHIP?

On the 493^rd anniversary of Henry VIII’s ‘quickie’ secret marriage with Ann Boleyn, we explore the perils of instant gratification…

Out of the frying pan, into the fire:

About 1400 BCE (and GPS) the Israelites fleeing from slavery in Egypt found themselves totally lost, footsore and starving in the Sinai desert. And then, out of a clear blue sky, Ta Da!

Out of the frying pan into the sky:

Food is now delivered by drone in cities as culturally (and climatically) diverse as Helsinki and Hong Kong, with one Dublin-based start-up (which operates in three countries) predicting: “in 2026 onwards we’ll be doing somewhere between three and five million deliveries a year.”  More importantly, these aerial angels are regularly deployed to deliver aid to the Israelites’ modern day equivalents starving in remote locations that Aid Agency lorries and jeeps cannot reach.*

Bread of Heaven meets Big Mac of Ha Tsuen?

Understandably, the Late Bronze Age Israelites had no earthly idea what the downpour of flaky white grains might be made of, so called it: Manna literally “What is it?” in Hebrew.

And while fast food drone deliveries began on selected Shanghai routes in 2018, I believe the question ‘What is it?’ may still apply.  

Is a deep-dish pizza drone delivery simply a super-fast way of satisfying a hungry tum, an opportunity to avoid cooking (and dirty dishes) or the centre of a feasting ritual that our species (humans, chimps, gorillas and bonobos) have enjoyed for at least 300,000 years?

Or is it, perhaps, the same pleasure in instant gratification that we find at our fingertips with Smart Phones, Social Media and Large Language Models?

The science bit…

Instant gratification triggers the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter most closely associated with pleasure and a key component in the brain’s reward system.

But the release of dopamine produced by instant gratification, often combined with the behavioural reinforcement of instant feedback, has also been identified as a major contributor to both addiction and obesity (I know this only too well. When my five flatmates and I lived above MacDonalds in Fulham’s North End Road, our record was 31 separate orders …in one rainy Sunday!)

But there are also many other damaging psychological effects**

'There has been numerous evidence of declining cognitive domains over time due to instant gratification. Cognitive domains constitute of – complex attention, executive function, learning and memory, language, perceptual-motor control, and social cognition (various social signals that help us learn about the world). Additionally, they noted a decline in abilities like working memory, simple visual and auditory reaction times, colour acuity, vocabulary usage pattern, 3D visuospatial aptitude and per capita rates of macro-innovation and creative genius. Related abilities such as visual working memory were also said to decline over time...'

And can determine life outcomes from childhood***

‘The ability to wait for larger delayed rewards, while resisting smaller immediate ones, predicts academic, social and health outcomes.  This ability has been assessed in the delay-of-gratification “marshmallow” task in which many children who resolve to wait for two treats nevertheless succumb to the temptation to eat just one. For adults, researchers use money rather than marshmallows as a common reward. By varying amounts and timing of sooner smaller rewards versus larger later ones, individuals’ choices can be used to estimate the rate at which they discount money over time.  Like delay of gratification, these discount rates derived from choices made in the laboratory also predict important life outcomes.’

For us in The Business of Pleasure (as in that other, older, and allegedly oldest branch of human commerce) the delay of gratification is what gives our work its very form and substance. 

An album is not a collection of songs.

And neither is a Musical (as any audience member attending any number of badly constructed ‘jukebox’ Musicals will readily confirm)

A film is not a collection of shots (…even if one of them kills James Bond)

Who in their right mind wants to flick to the end of Jane Eyre just to read, Dear Reader, I married him” ? …Charlotte Brontë certainly doesn’t want us to. 

Ditto Chopin and Shakespeare, as the inimitable Benjamin Zander illustrates beautifully at the grand piano:

“...So I’m going to take a piece of Chopin… (he plays the piece part-through, then stops suddenly)  Everybody knows (what happens next). Every village in Bangladesh and every hamlet in China. And Canada. Everybody knows da, da, da, da –da. Chopin didn’t want to reach the E there. Because what will have happened?  It will be over like Hamlet.  Do you remember?  Act One, Scene Three, he finds his uncle has killed his father. He keeps on going up to his uncle and almost killing him.  And then he backs away, and goes up to him again, almost kills him. The critics sitting in the back row there, they have to have an opinion so they say: “Hamlet is a procrastinator” or they say “Hamlet has an Oedipus complex.”  No, otherwise the play would be over, Stupid!  That’s why Shakespeare puts all that stuff in Hamlet. Ophelia going mad, the play within the play, and Yorick’s skull and the gravediggers.  That’s in order to delay… until Act Five he can kill him.  It’s the same with Chopin. He’s just about to reach the E, and he says, “Ooops, better go back up and do it again.” So he does it again. Now he gets excited (Zander keys a musical flourish). That’s excitement, don’t worry about it. Now, he gets to F-sharp, and he finally goes down to E, but it’s the wrong chord, he’s looking for this one, and instead he does… Now we call that a deceptive cadence, because it deceives us, I always tell my students, 'If you have a deceptive cadence, be sure to raise your eyebrows, then everybody will know.' Now he gets to the E again. That chord doesn’t work. Now he gets to the E again. That chord doesn’t work. And then finally… (Zander hits the long-lost, long-longed-for E, and turns, in triumph, to the audience). “There was a gentleman in the front row who went “Mmm.”  It’s the same gesture he makes when he comes home, after a long day, turns off the key in his car and says “Ah, I’m home.” Because we all know where home is.”

…and getting our audiences, our listeners and readers, to that home-point, through all the twists and turns, dramatic arcs and ‘exciting’ arpeggios, the ‘false cadences,’ false endings and eleventh hour numbers, and finally wring that satisfied ‘mmm’ from their lips… that is the 24/7 Delivery Business (come rain, hail or shine / fire, flood or famine) of The Business of Pleasure.

DT

14 November, 2025

*The Food Chain, BBC World Service, 13 November 2025

**Instant Gratification and The Digital Natives: A Pilot Study Manzia L., Tulika Borah, Rupjyoti Bhattacharjee, Jinamoni Salkia Educational Administration Theory and Practice journal, September 2023

***The Gist of Delay Gratification: Understanding and Predicting Problem Behaviours Valerie F Reyna Evan A Wilhelms, Journal of Behavioural Decision Making August 2016

****The transformative power of classical music. Benjamin Zander. TED.  Big thanks to Mark at the Arts and Culture Network for sharing with us.